Barney's Blog

A Win 8 Tablet Ouchie!

An MIT professor with a Harvard blog address (my sister starts her fancy new job at Harvard today!) has some choice words for Windows 8. Philipp Greenspun calls it "A Christmas gift for some you hate" and called the interface "a dog's breakfast." And you thought MIT people were all slide rules and calculators. This guy can write!

Greenspun's criticisms aren't exactly original, but he does a terrific job analyzing the difference between Win 8 as a tablet and the more refined iPad and Android.

As for the basics, "Microsoft here integrates the tablet and the standard Windows desktop in the most inconvenient and inconsistent possible way," Greenspun writes.

For instance, you can really run tablet apps and desktops at the same time.

He continues: "It is either the old Windows XP desktop or the new Android-like tablet environment. As far as I can tell they cannot be mixed except that a tablet app can be set to appear in a vertical ribbon on the left or right edge of the screen."

And you can't just use it as a pure tablet or a pure laptop/desktop either.

"Some functions, such as 'start an application' or 'restart the computer' are available only from the tablet interface. Conversely, when one is comfortably ensconced in a touch/tablet application, an additional click will fire up a Web browser, thereby causing the tablet to disappear in favor of the desktop," he argues.

And, as a tablet, it lacks ease of use refinements such as easy to find home and back buttons.